by Roland White of The Sunday Times Smart lottery winners have kept their eye on the ball by investing in buy-to-let homes or renovation to make their assets keep growing

The Ullahs have made £1.5m through property investment in two years It was about 20 years ago that Ron  Ullah put an arm around his wife, Ann, and announced some good news. Thanks to the construction business that he’d built from scratch, they were millionaires. “We’ll never have to worry about money again,” he said. Oh, what hollow words they turned out to be. Not long afterwards, the business was in ruins, a victim of the 1980s recession. Still, Ron and Ann aren’t worrying any more. Two years ago they won £5m on the lottery and, thanks to a handful of good property investments, they’ve made another £1.5m since then. “I’m not tempting fate this time,” says Ron. Good plan. Fate is currently being very kind to him.

The National Lottery celebrated its 10th anniversary last week, having created more than 1,650 millionaires. A few have blown the cash on champagne, fast cars and high living, but many have looked around to invest their money wisely. And property has been a popular choice.

“You’ve got to do something,” says Ron, 59. “And property has been very good over here.” It certainly has. Ron bought the family’s current home — a 1920s house in four acres of Essex countryside near Basildon — for £630,000 just 18 months ago. It is now worth £1m. But it’s his overseas investments that have really paid off.

The family have homes in Cyprus and Florida. They are also building two villas in Cyprus — bought, half-complete, for £300,000 and £185,000. “I’ve been going to Cyprus for 20 years and I like it,” says Ron. “The villas were an absolute must-buy. We looked for views and accessibility to the beach, and these places have got absolutely everything.”

Property investment is all about taking opportunities when they arise, which is considerably easier with a £5m bank balance. Ann and Ron spotted the potential of a site in Mexico after stopping there on a Caribbean cruise. “It was on the Costa Maya, which is going to be the next Cancun, only better,” he says. “We walked around the area, looked into an estate agent, and snapped up these six plots for £5,450 each.”

Ron is already looking at new locations: he is impressed by the new-look Beirut and also tips Bulgaria. “Any place can be good as long as you get the property cheaply enough,” he says. “So you need to find out what property is going for in the area. You need to do your homework.”

The best way of knowing the property market is living in the area in which you’re planning to buy. Just like Billy Gore, 51, who won just over £1m in 1996 while working as a Liverpool taxi driver.

“Within an hour of winning it we knew it wasn’t enough to retire on,” he says. “If we had bought a house in Formby — where a lot of the footballers live — and we’d got a couple of cars and a holiday, most of the money would be gone.”

Instead the family moved from their terraced house in Kirkby to nearby Knowsley. “I realised that I would have to do something, and it came about that there was a house round the corner that was coming up for sale,” says Billy. “I decided to buy that and rent it out.”

It was the start of what soon became a profitable buy-to-let empire. Billy says he makes up to £5,000 a year on his houses, and at one stage owned 40 properties.

The first was a three-bed terraced house in an area where the average price was £35,000. He did £12,000 of work, putting in central heating, new windows and a new bathroom. “It’s like a brand-new house. We rented it out at £85 a week and the tenant has been in there nearly eight years. I think I’ve only spoken to her five times.”

With his buy-to-let business and the rising value of his own home, the lifelong Liverpool football fan has doubled his money since winning the lottery and doesn’t worry about a slump. 

“If all my houses fell by 10% they would still be worth double what I paid, and I’m still getting £4,500-£5,000 a year in rent. So all I need do is just keep renting the houses out until prices go up again.”

Lottery winners Aldan and Sarah Ibbetson, from Leeds, also looked at the buy-to-let market when they won £3m in July 2002. “Things were rising in property,” says Aldan, 26. “We looked at buy-to-let but the rental market in Leeds was saturated.

“What we really wanted to do was find properties, renovate them and sell them on for a profit.” 
First, though, they bought themselves a little place in the country. In a village north of Leeds, they spotted a 1953 property in old Yorkshire stone. It has three acres, a pool, five beds and a large kitchen with an Aga. And since the Ibbetsons and their daughter moved in, it also has chickens and ducks.

The family then looked around for their first house to renovate. “We did quite a lot of research. We looked all around Leeds because the market was very buoyant at the time.”

So far they’ve tackled two houses. The first was a former council three-bedroom semi. “It needed an awful lot of work, especially on the outside. The garden was a tip. We took five or six skiploads of rubbish away. We bought it for £50,000 in September last year, spent £6,500, and sold it for £75,000.”

Although Aldan still runs the second-hand car business he built up, he is a trained joiner, so he does much of the renovation work himself. “I’ve done a lot of the joinery and plumbing work. The only things I don’t do are electrical work and plastering. We felt confident, looking at run-down houses, that we could do them up ourselves.” He does the heavy work, while Sarah does the interior design.

Their second project was very similar. They bought it for £60,000, did £15,000 of work and were recently offered £95,000.

But now they are finding it harder to repeat their successes. “We’re struggling to find properties,” says Aldan. “The market in Leeds has tightened up. People seem to want quite a lot for their properties, so we’re just going to wait and see what happens.”

With that £3m cushion, they’re in no particular hurry.